Fine Memorial To Mrs. Palmer

FINE MEMORIAL TO MRS. PALME3R

Ann Arbor's Most Noted Woman Graduate

A $425,000 ENDOWMENT

President Angell One of the Principal Speakers at the Harvard Memorial Services

President Angell will be one of the speakers at the memorial service for Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer, to be held at Harvard on January 23. Dr. Angell will speak on Mrs. Palmer's influence as a college woman, the deceased having been one of the first woman students at Michigan University, which she entered in 1872, graduating in 1876. President Hazard, of Wellesley, will speak of her influence as a college president; President Eliot of Harvard, of her influence in public life; and President Tucker of Dartmouth of her home and Christian life.

A plan is on foot to raise a $425,000 endowment of the presidency of Wellesley and ten $1,000 scholarships as a memorial to Mrs. Palmer. The Philadelphia Press contained the following appropriate notice of Mrs. Palmer:

It has been said that since the beginning of the movement for the higher feminine education no woman ever received so many university honors within so short a period of time as Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer, ex-president of Wellesley college, who died the other day.

When in 1887 the students of that institution of learning heard that their beloved head, who by her executive genius had in six years improved its standard and raised its reputation to a height almost exceeding the hopes of its founders, was going to resign and marry George Herbert Palmer, professor of philosophy, at Harvard, they lamented. The faculty were aghast. But the sincerest mourners of all were the children of the neighborhood, whom President Freeman had been in the habit of gathering together for little parties on the college grounds, and one little girl voiced her grief in language so Emersonian that it has become classic in Wellesley circles.

"You know," she was told by some consoling grown-ups, "the president is not going so very far away. You may see her again, for she will live in Cambridge."

"Oh," sobbed the uncomforted one. "that isn't anything. It isn't the nearness or the farness, it's the never-the-sameness."

In those days Miss Freeman, who born in 1855, was at the time of her death a woman of nearly 50, was possessed of a peculiarly charming and ethereal beauty and a winsome personality which suggested Tennyson's "Princess," for none of her "girl graduates" outdid her in sweetness. At the same time she did a vast deal more for Wellesley than to merely look pretty. Under her, the second president, the young college added new buildings and greatly increased its membership. She insisted that all special students except teachers pass the freshman examinations; regulated the granting of degrees; established an academic council and thoroughly organized all departments of instruction.

After becoming Mrs. Palmer she held for three years (1892-1895) the deanship of the woman's department of the newly-created University of Chicago, the same college which has so lately publicly repented of its coeducational basis. She represented Massachusetts as commissioner of education at the Columbian exposition, and was frequently heard on the lecture platform on topics bearing on education and reform. In 1895 Union college conferred at the same time on both her and her distinguished husband the degree of L. L. D., an instance which may be unique in history, of such an honor being bestowed on both husband and wife.